Graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp claims its recently unveiled plans intergate transformation and lighting (T&L) routines on its 3D chips will be a giant step forward in the PC graphics world. But it’s not sure when.
The recently floated, Santa Clara, California, has set no date for commercial delivery of T&L enabled 3-D chips, and company spokesman Derek Perez, admits that the pre-announcement of its T&L plans was motivated by a desire to be first, beating out other companies in the sector. However, he said that single chip graphics accelerators will be pervasive in the industry within two years.
He said that building T&L routines onto graphics chips should increase speed and realism. Transformation and lighting refers to the psychics, geometry and artificial intelligence that models a three dimensional environment and how determines figures ‘move’ through that environment. Currently, 3D graphics chips for PCs only go to work after T&L functions have been dealt with by the CPU, adding the texturing and bump mapping that fill out the geometric environment. By moving the T&L functions onto the graphics chips, Nvidia claims that graphics performance could be as much as ten times better and large amounts of processing power will be freed up in the CPU.
T&L isn’t new. It has slowly trickled down from the world of the high-end work station, and can now be found in Sony Corp’s multi-processor Playstation. However, Nvidia’s announcement is the first proposal for a single chip which incorporates these high-end features.
Advances in chip manufacturing have made this possible. Nvidia claims it could incorporate T&L on the current 0.25 micron process Riva TNT2 but not without a significant cost hike to the chip which is already nearly the size of a Pentium III. The company will start to offer T&L features as it moves to 0.22 micron process chips.
Perez says that another reason that Nvidia has announced the T&L features without any forthcoming product in the pipeline is because games developers need a long runway. The firm has already demonstrated the technology to key developers. Perez also claims business applications like low-cost CAD/CAM will be opened up by the new technology, as well as graphical e-commerce. One potential stumbling block is that developers will need to access T&L functionality through multimedia APIs such as Microsoft Corp’s Direct X and SGI’s OpenGL. Nvidia has worked on DX 6 with Microsoft but says it cannot discuss this work, which is bound by non-disclosure agreements.
